Re: Marketing (Was: Re: New developers and publicity)

[Nicola Pero]

> A marketing section at GNUstep.org would go a long way to alleviating this 
> situation. This is part of my plan, but there's more to this than one man 
> can do. When I approached Stefan Urbanek earelier this year, and asked him 
> if I could move the StepTalk website to GNustep.org, I had this 
> cohesiveness in mind. Stefan was very receptive to the idea. 
> Unfortunately, Nicola Pero was not. His disgustingly outdated website 
> still remains at http://www.gnustep.it/jigs/.

I really appreciate your compliments - you're a real gentleman - thanks.

The site is not outdated, if the software is stable and doesn't change,
the information doesn't change either.  Not great graphics / web design,
-- feel free to send me better stuff and I'll use it, since you didn't
send me anything better than what's there, you get what's there.

You never explained exactly why you wanted the website moved into another
domain/server (given that html links to pages on the same server or on a
different server are the same from a user point of view), and you
disappeared after sending me a first email.

>From a marketing point of view I also think that it's actually good to
have multiple separate pages for different GNUstep projects, each with its
own personality, which gives the impression that GNUstep is actually a
large and ramified system with lots of different projects under the
umbrella.  If we had everything in a couple of web pages all with the same
look, well, the project would look quite small and miserable.  You can
still link all the pages for the different projects from a central website
with some information on each in a consistent format etc.

Btw why don't you work on making new web pages for projects which don't
have any (such as gnustep-guile) instead of bashing on one of the few
projects (JIGS) that has got some web pages ?

Or else, send me new graphics/pages for the JIGS web pages and I'll 
certainly be very happy to use them.


> JIGS is in need of a permanent maintainer, which is another issue which
> needs resolution.

I'm not quite sure what problems you have with current maintenance.

Do you have a pending patch ?  Do you have a feature request ?

We apply no patches ... because I receive no patches to apply.

We implement no features ... because I receive no features request.

I suspect nobody is using it except for the company I work for, and for us
it's working very well.  Of course whenever we find a problem we
immediately fix it and apply the patch.

Btw complex cross-language engines such as JIGS should only be used in
exceptional cases and with great care because they have considerably
performance implications and can add considerable complexity to projects.  
So I'm not surprised there are few users for it.

I somewhat doubt that GNUstep will be succesful or not depending on the
JIGS website, given that it is a very specialized development framework
probably only useful for coders writing serious stuff which need to load
ObjC libraries for their own reasons (probably they have a lot of code in
ObjC already which they need to use) into some sort of Enterprise Java
environment because they are involved in some sort of corporate
integration where part of the stuff must be in Java for reasons outside
their control.

Anyway, if you have a long-standing JIGS contributor with a known track of
good work on it that you want to propose as a maintainer, feel free, if
he's a good coder and a balanced person, and if he's willing to do for us
all the fixes we need when we need them, I don't mind, it's less work for
me/us if he does them.

Thanks for the compliments again